Tag Archives: Rincon Farmers Market

An Update: Clearing the Jungle, Rincón Farmer’s Market and More

We have been staying pretty busy. Every day is another new adventure for us. Sometimes we get a little overwhelmed with everything we need to do so we decide to just hang out in the cabana or on the property all day long.

Cabana Bridge
We spend a lot of time on the cabana and this is the bridge that connects to the top

Then we remember that whatever we “need” to do is only because we think we do and we get re-energized. So really anything we need to do is actually just a want. The property has sat empty for over a decade, so there is no rush except in our heads.

I think we have a good balance of going out and staying in. We have started to meet more people which is nice and they have offered a lot of helpful advice. We love hearing all the stories of how people ended up here.

We continue to make progress on the property painting a bit more and making it more comfortable. Britton has been clearing out more and more of the jungle. He took down this big weed termite attracting tree but it took about 2 mornings and a lot of elbow grease since he just used the bow saw to take it down.

1st going Going Gone
Going, going, gone…opened up the view to a nice royal palm in the gully

We finally tried the Thai restaurant Ode to the Elephants and really liked it! And we went to the opening night of the pizza place Mi Familias that moved to the old Rum Shack spot of the Lazy Parrot. We also went to the Rincón Farmer’s Market and it has really grown since we had been there before and is now a weekly event! We drank some fresh coconut water, some freshly squeezed cane juice and ate some red bananas.

Coco y guineo
Guineos y coco fresco -with a papaya stem straw
Sipping coco
Yum!

Fresh coconut water doesn’t taste anything like a piña colada but it is really refreshing. It is slightly sweet and slightly salty too. Sugarcane juice on the other hand is very sweet. I got to taste a small amount after I asked to take a video of the juicing process.

Rincon

BK in plaza
Britton at the Farmer’s Market with our goods

We talked with a few people at the market and it sounds like it is pretty easy to get a table and sell stuff there. We are thinking of starting with chicken eggs and going from there when we are all set up. One of the venders even invited us to check out their finca in Moca which we thought was pretty cool.

We are slowly getting more and more comfortable at home, but we still don’t have a stove or burners, so we have been eating most of our food from the rice cooker and heating tortillas on the coffee pot -lol. It actually works remarkably well.

Rice and beans
Rice and beans have become a staple for us!
Food for chili
Some food from the grocery store

tortillas on coffee pot
Quesadillas/tortillas on the coffee pot!

We have been able to find just about everything we need at the local grocery store, Edward’s Family Coop. They will even special order stuff. It is a bit more expensive, though, like $7.50 for a container of Breyer’s ice cream. Hence the rice and beans which are cheap and relatively healthy too. We also have tried “sofrito” which is like Puerto Rican salsa and VERY garlicky. So we just use a little to season our rice and beans.

Our other favorite thing is finding all the beautiful beaches. Like Dome’s Beach that looks like a set on a science fiction movie because of the shut-down nuclear reactor that overlooks the beach. It is also where they had the surfing event in the 60’s that put Rincón on the surf-scene map.

Domes Beach
Domes Beach

Overall, we are having a blast. There is a lot going on so hopefully this update catches us up a bit.

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Selling our Garden Bounty

One thing we love to do in Colorado and that we are excited to try in Puerto Rico, is growing things and selling them. I sell our chicken eggs to a friend year round and I have some other people who like to buy them from time to time in the summer months when we get 5-6 eggs a day (or almost 3 dozen a week!). But when all of our plants start coming in, we also like to sell those, or the fruits from them.


At the Greeley Farmer’s Market a few years back (Selling tropical plants, but of course!)

We used to sell some of our plants at the Greeley Farmer’s Market, but now they require all sorts of expensive insurance and crap, so small backyard growers like us have been pushed out. But there is one great marketplace still around: Craigslist! We love Craigslist and use it to buy things we may need and we list our rentals as well as things around our house and from our garden and greenhouse.


One of our comfrey plants


Tomatoes and lots of other plants in the greenhouse this year


We are finishing up with the strawberry season at our house, but had a bumper crop this year!

Just tonight we sold some tomato plants that were overtaking our greenhouse floor. We also have some people interested in buying some of our comfrey plant crowns. We love doing it. I like writing up the descriptions and waiting for people to contact me. Britton is good at digging up plants and making them look good. Selling our garden bounty feels more like fun than work! We would be working in the garden anyway and so when we get paid to do it and we see how happy people are with our plants, it makes us all the more pleased.

For instance, the woman who bought our plants tonight had had all of hers torn apart when we had that hail storm a few days ago, so she was super excited to be able to start her tomato garden up again -and for way less than it would be to replace them with plants from Home Depot or a nursery.

Britton says lately he has been having dreams of planting an acre or so of our land in Rincon with rows of pepper plants. I am not sure how well peppers grow there, but I would imagine fairly good. And in Rincon, we would still be able to sell them -and eggs, palm trees, coconuts, mangoes, etc, etc- at the Farmer’s Market! There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look. We are really excited and summers in Colorado make us all the more ready to live a summer-lifestyle year-round.


At the Rincon Farmer’s Market

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